Nuttall was brought up in Bootle, near Liverpool, where he attended a Catholic comprehensive school and, like everyone else in his community, grew up backing Labour. He is now an MEP for the north west of England. As my colleague Jessica Elgot points out, being from Merseyside does not in itself mean everyone in the north will vote for him.

Jessica Elgot (@jessicaelgot)

Nuttall's Ukip election is definitely worst outcome for Labour. But just because he's from Liverpool doesn't mean he'll win over Yorkshire.

But, unlike Farage, he is not open to the charge of being an public school-educated former City trader and he is not an archetypal product of the home counties like James. More importantly, he is also strongly pushing an authoritarian, traditionalist agenda that he thinks will appeal to the socially conservative working class who instinctively vote Labour in the north of England.

Here are the key points from his speech.

Nuttall said he wanted Ukip to replace Labour as the “patriotic voice of working people”.

My ambition is not insignificant: I want to replace the Labour party and make Ukip the patriotic voice of working people.

He suggested that this was a realistic goal because Labour had now stopped representing working people.

Today, we have a Labour party that has ceased to speak the language or address the issues of working people.

They have a leader who won’t sing the national anthem; a shadow chancellor who seems to admire the IRA more than the British Army, a shadow foreign secretary who sneers at the English flag and a shadow home secretary who advocates unlimited immigration.

They have clearly lost touch. They are more at home talking about the issues that swirl around the Islington dinner table than the issues that matter to working class communities.

So whilst Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour debate the Palestine question, fair trade and climate change, we instead will talk about the issues that concern real working people in real working class constituencies.

He said Ukip would stop Theresa May’s government watering down Brexit.

The country needs a strong Ukip more now than ever before, for if Ukip ceases to be an electoral force then there will be no impetus for Theresa May’s government to give us real Brexit.

What we will end up with is some sort of mealy-mouthed back sliding version, which doesn’t allow us to control our own borders, sign our own trade deals or make all our own laws.

This would be a betrayal of the British people and a united Ukip under my leadership will never allow that to happen ...

We will hold the government’s feet to fire electorally and ensure that Brexit really does mean real Brexit.

He outlined Ukip’s policy agenda, stressing an authoritarian approach to law and order, support for grammar schools, increased defence spending and more devolution to England. He also stressed Ukip’s patriotism, suggesting that this was a value that linked all these issues.

We will continue to call for fair but firm immigration controls which protects wages and ensures that British workers are not undercut.

We will call for sentences to mean what they say and promote policies that protect innocent victims and not career criminals.

We will promote aspiration and social mobility and ensure that working class children get the same start in life as their middle-class counterparts.

We will therefore become the champion of education by ability and not wealth.

We will support our military to the hilt. We commit to an increase in defence expenditure and ensure our brave boys and girls in the armed forces have the best equipment possible.

We will also honour the military covenant and ensure that those who are brave enough to put their lives on the line to protect this country are looked after when they return home. It is least we can do.

We will also be committed to protecting and investing in the National Health Service and slashing a foreign aid budget that is costing us around £25m every day.

We will also continue talk about the issues the other parties are too scared to touch. We will not be afraid to say that female genital mutilation and forced marriage have no place in 21st century Britain and nor do courts where the word of woman only worth half that of a man.

Finally, whilst we as a party believe in the United Kingdom and are Unionist to our fingertips, under my leadership we will champion a fair devolution deal for England and the English.

I say this because there is a value that unites the vast majority of the British people away from the small metropolitan cliques and it is a value that Ukip embodies. And that value is called patriotism.

Nuttall was talking about current Ukip policies, but he sounded more authoritarian than Nigel Farage, who has some libertarian instincts (even if he sometimes conceals them successfully.)

Nuttall said that Ukip’s supporters were not going to go back to the other parties.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is remarkable that even after the summer and autumn we have had that Ukip is still polling 13%.

It is clear that there is a bank of people out there who vote Ukip and they are not going to return to Establishment parties.

He said he was committed to uniting the party. And he suggested that people in the party who were not prepared to unite could be forced out.

There will be one theme: unity, because only unity breeds success. People do not vote, join or donate to divided parties.

So to those within the party who want to come together and unite, I say, we have a great and successful future.

To those who do not want to unify and want to continue with the battles of past, then I am afraid your time in in this party is coming to an end ...

Today is the day that we start to put the Ukip jigsaw back together. It is day zero. It is a new beginning.

And that means not just playing lip-service to my call for unity, but it means practicing what we preach.

It means the factions of the party coming together.

It means allowing bygones to be bygones.

And it means being prepared to get around a table, talk and sort out our differences.

It was not clear from what Nuttall said whether the threat of expulsions was real, or just rhetorical. For example, Nigel Farage’s supporters in the party would love to force out Douglas Carswell, Ukip’s only MP whose stance on immigration puts him at odds with most of the party. And Neil Hamilton, the former Tory minister who now leads the Ukip group in the Welsh assembly, is seen as another divisive figure that some would like to remove.

Nuttall announced three key appointments.

To that end my first appointment is my deputy leader, who is someone who has backed my campaign and bought into my idea of unity from the very beginning: Peter Whittle.

My second is my party chairman, who is someone who has grown in stature during the Summer months and has emerged from the shambles with his reputation enhanced: Paul Oakden.

My third is my principle political adviser, who has one of the most perceptive and acute political brains in politics today, Patrick O’Flynn.

On the World at One Dan Jarvis, the Labour MP tipped as a potential leadership candidate in the future, has said that his party should take the threat from Ukip very seriously. And Labour had to show voters that it has listened to their concerns on immigration, he said.

Jarvis makes the same point in an interview with the Times today. He told the paper:

It is clear to me that the Ukip fox is in the Labour henhouse and we have got to make a decision about what we want to do about that fox.

They see the low-hanging political fruit as being Labour voters … not just in our heartlands but across the country.

There are very few Labour MPs, if any, who would say that they are in what’s traditionally been referred to as safe seats. I’m not sure such a thing exists any more.

Tories says Ukip are too 'divided and incompetent' to offer any serious solutions

And this is what the Conservative party is saying about Paul Nuttall. A spokesman said:

Now on their third leader in as many months, Ukip are too divided, distracted and incompetent to offer any serious solutions for the people of Britain.

After a leadership contest, which the winner himself has described as ‘completely shambolic’ we’ve seen brawls and squabbling – but nothing about the issues facing ordinary working people.

It’s the Conservative party which held a referendum and is now delivering on the people’s verdict. We will deliver Brexit and more control on immigration - while UKIP continue to squabble on the sidelines.

In a briefing note for journalists the Tories flagged up Nuttall’s support for more privatisation in the NHS as a weakness, just as Labour did. (See 12.25pm.) But the Tory note also criticised Nuttall saying, in 2009, that climate change was “a con” and for casting doubt, in 2013, on the value of shared parental leave.